Xbox Live Indie Games Rating Manipulation 49
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft seems to be turning a blind eye to the Xbox Live Indie game area. Certain indie developers have found a way to abuse the independent game ranking system in order to down-vote popular indie titles while up-voting their own. Due to this, games are falling out of the valuable top 20 slot and the value of the ranking system is jeopardized."
This just in... (Score:1)
When money is on the line, people are self-serving. Color me surprised.
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Is it self-serving to take actions that ultimately leave both you and your competitors worse off? I'd call it simple stupidity.
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Only in the long term.
Next month and the month after that, you get to cash a bigger check than the next guy...
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Where is the story on the apple version of this?
It happens on any type of "user rated" environment where the players are so small that no one cares. I had an iphone long ago, and I learned very quickly not to trust the ratings system at all. Too many times I'd read the reviews and half of them would be 1 star ratings that say "App X is superior to this". Something tells me that those people weren't independent users. Especially when half the reviews were made up of the same exact message.
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One major difference is that you have to download (often also buy) the software you want to rate on the app store. On the XBLIG marketplace it's possible to rate games without even owning a 360 or the game so it's possible to set up a ton of accounts and vote with all of them.
It's been going downhill for a while now (Score:2)
Sad but thats what marketing is for (Score:1)
Unless you were one of the first games to launch on the platform or you had massive brand recognition, its effectively impossible to climb the "Top Sellers" or "Top Rated" charts which is pretty much the only way to market the game post-release.
Its not just Xbox Live Indie games either, Xbox Live Arcade and Playstation Network games all suffer from the same problem. Castle Crashers was one of the first Xbox Live Arcade games and its proven to be nigh impossible to dethrone both on the "Best Selling" and "To
Re:Sad but thats what marketing is for (Score:4, Informative)
Castle Crashers was one of the first Xbox Live Arcade games
Uhm... say what now?
Xbox360: released November 22, 2005.
Castle Crashers: released August 27, 2008.
Almost THREE YEARS of Xbox Live Arcade games separates the two.
This has been a message from reality. As an additional message: please stop smoking crack.
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Both XBLIG lists are populated with software from all eras of the service. The top rated game is Cthulhu Saves The World which was released last December and #3 is Oozi which came out only days ago. There isn't much in terms of brand recognition on the service but people do get attracted by titles like "fart wars" or whatever. They get downloads but not high ratings.
They'll just do what they did for themselves. (Score:1)
Notice that in the last big dashboard update, they got rid of the ability to rate full games? If you bought a game, stuck it in, played it and hated it, you could rate it out of five stars and it would display an average score on any game you looked at through the dashboard.
They conveniently removed that and I've never heard it discussed in the months, since.
A bit premature to say it is ignored (Score:5, Interesting)
You can hardly say that Microsoft is turning a blind eye to this only 3½ working days after announcing that they are looking into it. It will take time to process the logs to find the trends and then make some changes so this cannot happen again. The blogger from TFA has had longer to come up with some figures and still only says that he has a "personal hunch" that the figures have been manipulated based on what he thinks the games should be rated.
If you look at the first blog mentioning this they single out the fans of College Lacrosse 2011 to be the bad guys and yet the graphs shown a week later have the lacrosse game dropping in the ratings. With any rating system, I assume that there must be some attempts to fudge the figures, so it seems quite plausible that the blogger may end up being correct. But my point is that it takes time to find out what is really happening. They have to be more sure than just saying that something looks fishy before they take action.
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All that's actually happening is fans of one game are voting it up, whilst voting other games they don't like down.
The real problem is that there is zero accountability in the system to stop fraudulent voting, though. If I'm a fan of Game X, and I tried Game Y and hated it, I can give them bad reviews. If I am a fan of game X, and think it should be on the "highest rated games", should I be downrating the current highest-rated games merely to give my favorite a boost? Well, I'm being dishonest if I do. I sh
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The solution (Score:5, Interesting)
MS should scrap the web front end for submitting game ratings.
Instead, it should only be possible to submit a game rating from the XBox itself, using an account that's unlocked at least one achievement from the game.
Since the XBLIG games are only accessible to people with an internet-enabled XBox and a Live account, that shouldn't disenfranchise anyone who's actually got a relevant opinion.
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I agree though, that as a minimum they should have a gamertag and have downloaded the game.
Unlike most PC games, many Xbox 360 games support multiple controllers on one system. So why shouldn't having a gamertag and having played the game at a mate's house count?
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Using the idea of having at least one achievement from the game, then shouldn't playing it at a mates house give you that one achievement?
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Yes this is a more balanced approach.
Although it can still be manipulated, but at least you'll have to wait to the download to finish, and game to launch.
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Seriously... (Score:3)
It's been what, twenty years of top downloaded/most votes lists, and we still can't make a fair system? Shiiit. Android market, the appstore, now this, they all suffer from the same flaws and drawbacks. Why can't some interface/social-schmocial people figure out a way to get this right?!
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Because the Internet does not provide a way to positively ID and track its users. And it shouldn't, either.
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They make it easy to browse and discover content. They also have suggestions (if you like this, you might like that). Certainly they have a top N list, but it's certainly not as important to have your book in the top N as it is on an app store.
A somewhat misleading summary... (Score:3, Insightful)
Just to be clear: the developers of CL2011 asked their fans to vote up CL2011; they didn't ask them to vote down other games and have since put up a note on Facebook asking their fans to play nicely. So this appears to be down to overzealous loony fan-boys, rather than anything else.
(however, it has been suggested that several other developers have gone down the fake-account-vote route to try and boost their initial ranking. There's certainly been a number of recent games rated at 4+, which I'd personally rate at 2 or 3. Though to be fair, I am a bitter and jaded gamer...)
In any case, Microsoft need to fix this sharpish, as the problem isn't restricted to XBLIG, but also applies to XBLA and the rest of Microsoft's DLC empire - it's just more visible on XBLIG as the average number of votes/game is low. In fact, the odds are good that there's at least one marketing company ready and willing to drop a votebomb, inbetween spamming social networks with tales of how great basic_bejewelled_clone_5 is...
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I think XBLIG isn't exactly getting the most accurate ratings anyway, people will vote something up just because it has nice production values for an XBLIG game even if it's not even remotely competitive with what else is out there (some XBLIG games are competitive with the rest of the gaming market). Also boobies will boost the ratings.
And? (Score:2)
Who cares?
There is only something like 75 games...
it's not 10000, you can try them all before buying!
It's not like people who produce for the App Store don't buy their own apps...
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A truely reliable rating system would be nice, but I'm afraid that in such an extreme proprietary environment it would have to be made on the web, independantly to be trustable...
Microsoft just doesn't know how to do things right anymore.
But yeah, the more opinions the better :-)
Indie Games (Score:2)
I'd say their larger problem with Indie Games is the lack of quality control.
I'm happy to play a small game. But there are many games on there that are pretty much "I figured out how to draw a sprite, time to publish!", or worthless variants on other trivial games.
More content is fine - the problem is that these little turds take up spaces in the new release list (a valuable source of advertising) - and the problem feeds on itself. I think a lot of gamers have given up looking through the new Indie games
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I know if I was developing an XBox Live game, I'd try to find out how to get listed as a "real" arcade game
Please allow me to rephrase what I've heard from CronoCloud and other Slashdot posters whom I have asked about this. In order to get out of the indie games ghetto, first you have to start a corporation or LLC and lease a secure office. Then you have to develop and sell copies of a game for PC, iOS, or Android in an unrelated genre. Do you have the finances to do this?
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Yes I do, thanks for asking!
But I don't intend to. All I'm saying is Microsoft could make Indie games a lot more successful with a bit of quality control, some loosening of restrictions, and some better discovery tools (to be fair, all the "app stores" need better discovery/categorization tools).
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The hurdle for XBLA is very high, you practically have to sign up with a big name publisher (even though digital releases shouldn't need one...) and get one of their limited number of release slots to get on there. Developers often start out on WiiWare (even if they never actually release a game on that service) to get the attention of those publishers as that has a much lower barrier to entry.
XBLIG is really meant for amateurs and I think that's fine, sometimes you can find something interesting on there.
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